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Sketched Jan. 3, 2013

When the Museum of History & Industry moved to the old Naval Reserve armory last month, the art-deco building from the Depression era became its newest, and largest, exhibition piece.

I’ve seen the monumental building many times, but I had never noticed how much it looks like an actual ship ready to sail into Lake Union.

The design wasn’t just a cute idea. Built in 1942, the armory was a training center for the Navy for more than five decades. Inside its “bridge,” which faces the lake, Navy reservists sharpened their navigational skills overlooking the water.

That room now features MOHAI’s maritime galleries, including a 40-foot submarine periscope that gives visitors a 360-degree view above Lake Union Park.

Below are more drawings from my visit. Give any of the sketches a good click to see them large!

This is the view of the armory as you walk into Lake Union Park. The Virginia V can be seen on the edge of the lake.

The drill hall where sailors used to practice marching formations showcases some of the best known items in MOHAI’s collection. The Boeing B-1 seaplane seemed much bigger than when I sketched it in one of the hallways of the old museum in Montlake.

Another cool exhibit located in the drill hall is an interactive display of Seattle-area symbols. Spin around a wheel and you’ll make the props move. Ann Farrington, the museum’s creative director, called it the biggest “calliope” you could think of.

What has drawn your attention around Seattle lately? Send me your suggestions of interesting places and people to sketch via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.

Sketched Nov. 18, 2012

Last Sunday, I sketched Seattle Art Museum visitors admiring two masterpices that are part of an interesting exhibit, “Elles, Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou.” The show, open through Jan. 13, includes 130 works of art made by women artists from 1907 to 2007.

Only pencil sketching is allowed in the galleries, but I welcomed the limitation. It forced me to think about light and dark values more than I usually do.

Sketched Jan. 25, 2012
From Fun Forest to Glass Garden.
The transformation of the grounds west of the Space Needle is well under way since the outdated but beloved amusement park closed for good after Labor Day 2010.
The glass museum devoted to Dale Chihuly’s work, a project that drew a lot of criticism when it was first announced, is scheduled to open in the spring.
As an artist, I can imagine how much this might mean to Chihuly. What an amazing opportunity to have your artwork displayed at Seattle Center — the city’s living room, as some describe it — in such a prominent fashion.
Visitors will get a full retrospective of Chihuly’s career, culminating in a 100-foot-long assemblage of 1,400 glass pieces suspended from the ceiling of the garden’s centerpiece “glass house.”
Even Chihuly’s sketches will be on display, which makes me dream about my own Sketcher museum. My drawings are so little, they would all fit in a P-Patch!

Drawn to Seattle Center
Below are sketches of Seattle Center from my archives. The links will take you to the original posts where they appeared.
[View the story "Drawn to Seattle Center" on Storify]
What has drawn your attention around Seattle lately? Send me your suggestions of interesting places and people to sketch via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Have a great weekend!

Sketched Jan. 4, 2012
I started the year packing for a move. But I’m not going far. By Monday, my sketchbooks, art supplies and (hopefully) my computer will be just across the street in my new cubicle at The Seattle Times’ consolidated offices on Denny Way.
Our newsroom move is a logistical nightmare because we have to keep producing a newspaper every day, but a visit to MOHAI gave me new perspective on what a really big move entails.
While packers organized vaults and crates in the basement, the museum staff was staging exhibits and restoring artifacts before packing them in custom containers. Photos aside, more than 100,000 artifacts must be slated for display or stored before the museum’s grand opening at the old armory in Lake Union Park on Nov. 17. And the relics come in all shapes and sizes, including icons of Seattle’s past such as a giant Rainier beer bottle from TV commercials, the “Slo-mo” hydroplane and the Lincoln Towing Toe Truck.
How do you begin to move all that? To start, the truck’s toes will have to come off to get it through the door.

Web Extra
The sketches below didn’t run in today’s print edition.

There’s more to the museum relocation than meets the eye. Before the Hansen Bros. movers begin to take the artifacts from Montlake to the old Armory, a good deal of cleaning, restoration and exhibit planning takes place in what museum staff calls the “staging room.”
That’s where I met art conservationists Corine Landrieu and Sarah Molitch as they worked on an interesting object. Molitch was using a toothbrush-like tool to clean damaged parts from the back of a wooden sculpture in the shape of a well-dressed gentleman sporting a fancy moustache. The piece is one of many figureheads that used to adorn the prows of sailing ships centuries ago. Landrieu said it was probably carved after the owner of the vessel.

In addition to cleaning and restoration, every artifact has to be staged before packing it away. It’s important that all the pieces belonging to one display stay together, explained Kristin Halunen, the museum’s registrar. On the sketch above, you can see costume and textile specialist Clara Berg checking the arrangement of items that will be part of a Victorian-era dressing room exhibit. The paper on the floor marks the shape of the custom container that will be used to transport the pieces.

Artifacts that will be on display for the first time at the new museum lay on shelves all over the staging room. I did this sketch, minus some of the color, while Halunen showed me a collection of early mobile phone prototypes. Next to them was a Macintosh computer just like the one I bought in 1990 when I was in college. Visiting the museum can be weird that way, said Halunen. “A lot of times you start to see your own life.”

Some of MOHAI’s prized possessions are so big that they had to cut a hole in the wall of the 1950s building to get them inside. That’s how the B-1 floatplane, the first commercial plane made by Boeing, found its way to this tight corner of the museum. In a couple of months, it will go back through the same hole, now covered with a rolling garage-door, before it becomes one of the centerpieces of the new museum in Lake Union Park.
What has drawn your attention around Seattle lately? Send me your suggestions of interesting places to sketch via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Have a great weekend!

Sketched Sept. 21, 12:50 p.m.
As Boeing prepares to deliver the first 787 on Sunday, the workers must feel a great sense of accomplishment.
Velva Maye, 87, shares a similar feeling about B-17 bombers. During World War II, she was one of a four-woman team in charge of ordering the rivets, clamps, nuts and bolts that kept the “Flying Fortresses” together. And, after retiring with 40 years of service, she and other volunteers helped restore one that is parked outside the Museum of Flight.
“This plane came out of the assembly line on Feb. 13, 1943,” Maye said. “I started buying parts in Boeing in 1942; therefore, I feel it has my parts on it.”
As proud as Maye is of “her” plane, she’s also worried that leaving it outdoors may ruin the years of restoration work, and she’d like to find a hangar for it. “It needs a warm, dry home,” said Maye.

2:50 p.m.
The bomber’s nose, engines, cockpit and gunner turret were just covered up a few days ago to protect the aircraft from the rain. Maye said it’s the only B17-F in flying condition in the world. “It was restored to the original blueprint.”

3:42 p.m.
More than 7,000 B17 bombers were built at Boeing’s Plant 2 just across Boeing Field. Demolition of the plant, which was camouflaged during the war to hide it from Japanese aircraft attack, started in 2010 and seems well underway. From the South Park Marina across the Duwamish River I could only see one piece of the building still standing. The demolition of the huge hangar buildings has completely transformed the landscape.
What has drawn your attention around Seattle lately? Send me your suggestions of interesting places to sketch via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Have a great weekend!

May 30, 12:31 p.m.
I went back to the Burke Museum over the weekend so my kids could also see Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway (see earlier post.) The family outing allowed me to explore and sketch other parts of the museum’s paleontology collection that I had not seen before.
Learning about the Sea-Tac sloth was a highlight of the visit. Can you imagine this beast roaming around where the airport is today? My kids seemed somewhat unimpressed, but, you know me, I get easily excited, especially if I come across something interesting to sketch.
The remains of the extinct mammal were discovered during construction of a new runway at the airport in 1961.

May 28, 11:24 a.m. [Click sketch to view larger]
Last Friday, after visiting the exhibit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway at the Burke Museum, I tweeted my sketch of this monument and Andrew Zahler recognized the location right away.
Zahler, 30, grew up in Seattle and now lives in Spokane. He said the image triggered vivid memories off playing around the monument as a kid. “When I was between 5 and 6 I went to a small kindergarten in Capitol Hill and I know I was there on a field trip,” said Zahler, who last visited the museum in 1994.
I can see how the Native American poles and monuments outside the Burke would leave a big impression on a 5-year-old. But even as an adult, I’m also captivated by their beauty and symbolism.
“Single Fin” is a replica of a grave monument in Howkan, Alaska. The original was commissioned around 1880 by Moses Koohl-Keet as a memorial to his uncle, head of Brown Bear House, a branch of the Haida tribe.
You can learn more about other poles and monuments outside the Burke Museum during a free presentation this evening –sorry for the short notice!– or visiting the museum’s website.

10:52 a.m. [Click sketch to view larger]
The combination of whimsical art and paleontology at the Burke Museum exhibit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway will delight both art and science lovers.
As soon as I walked in this morning I also realized it’s perfect for my 4-year-old daughter, who lists ‘digging dinosaur bones’ as one of the things she wants to do when she grows up. Also on her list: to be an artist, so she’s going to love seeing Ray Troll’s colorful art next to the real bones of dinosaurs who lived millions of years ago.
Paleontologist Kirk Johnson and Troll drove 5,000 miles across the American West imagining life in the age of dinosaurs, looking for fossils and documenting their trip with sketches and illustrations that led to this exhibit.
Museum visitor David Dickey said his 3-year-old son Nathaniel was mostly drawn to the fossils, not the art. “It’s the real thing,” he said.
Nathaniel seemed to be a true dinosaur fan. He showed me the dinosaur prints on his rain boots. “There, that’s a dinosaur,” he said.
This weekend is the last opportunity to see the exhibit. It is open through Memorial Day.

May 26, 10:15 a.m. [Click on sketch to view larger]
Not far from High Flying Coffee is Paul Allen’s Flying Heritage Collection, where I went Wednesday morning for a sneak peek at the museum’s latest wartime artifact, a World War II tank that will be unveiled during a Memorial Day event on Monday.
Mark Kepler, manager of aircraft maintenance, didn’t expect to be driving tanks when he started working here, but the veteran commercial pilot doesn’t mind changing gears. “I used to drive heavy equipment bulldozers and this is similar,” he said.
On Monday, those skills and a poorly translated 3-page Czech manual will come handy when he operates the Soviet T-34, which has been kept under wraps since it arrived. Kepler said it takes a lot of muscle to drive the 34-ton vehicle. “It’s a real workout.”
The World War II tank has been re-militarized to fire blanks and painted snow white like the Red Army tanks that fought in Belarus in the winter of 1945, explained Adrian Hunt, the collection’s executive director. It was shipped to the U.S. from the Czech Republic, where someone had it stored in a barn, Hunt said, and it made a stop in Florida for an engine tune up before arriving to Seattle by truck in April.
Curator Cory Graff said it’s a very important tank because of its design, which was used as a model for future tanks. “It’s the ’57 Chevy of tanks, it’s a classic,” he said.
Monday’s military vehicle demonstration will also showcase a German tank destroyer, anti-aircraft guns and World War II jeeps and trucks from the Puget Sound Military Vehicles Club.

July 15, 10:39 a.m. Click on sketches to view larger.
If a weekend of fishing salmon is not on your schedule, airplanes may be the way to go. A couple of World War II fighter planes from the Flying Heritage Collection will return to the sky for a ‘Fly Day‘ at Paine Field in Everett on Saturday.
On Wednesday I visited the collection and sketched one of them while mechanics were doing checks. Retired Col. Ralph Jenkins, 90, of Seattle, will be at Paine Field to watch the flight of this plane, which is painted like the six “Tallahassee Lassie” Thunderbolts he flew during the war. Named for his wife, the Tallahassee Lassie planes featured her image painted on the nose. It was common for fighter airplanes to display pictures of the pilots wives or girlfriends, explained Jenkins, who flew 129 combat missions, including on D-Day. “There were a lot of girl pictures on P-47s,” he said on a phone interview, adding that his wife was a good sport about the art. They met in Tallahassee 67 years ago and married in just four months. “She was a very pretty bride and is here with me today.”
I didn’t get to meet Col. Jenkins, but while at the collection I got to talk to another veteran pilot, James B. Thoren (above), 87, who flew B-25s. He is a docent at the collection and explained that the Thunderbolt was the largest single-engine fighter of WWII. He also said that every time they painted nose art on a Thunderbolt for Jenkins to fly the picture of his wife seemed to appear with less clothes on.
The free air show starts at noon and lasts about an hour. Watch from the west end of 109th Street Southwest at Paine Field, near the museum hangar.